Human Rights Watch Daily Brief, 23 July 2014

Iraq forces kill civilians; UN to investigate Israel’s Gaza offensive; bodies from #MH17 transported to the Netherlands; who’s “hard to reach” when it comes to HIV?; 100 days have passed since Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls; the rollback on women’s rights in Afghanistan.

Iraq’s
security forces have killed at least
75 civilians and wounded hundreds of others in indiscriminate air strikes
on five cities since June 6. Iraq may be fighting a vicious insurgency,
but that’s no license to kill civilians anywhere they think Islamic State of
Iraq and Sham (ISIS) fighters might be lurking.

The UN Human Rights Council today voted to launch
an independent investigation into Israel’s offensive in Gaza. Hours
earlier, the council’s head, Navi Pillay, said that Israeli’s actions may
amount to “war crimes.” US Secretary of State John
Kerry arrived in Tel
Aviv in hopes of brokering a ceasefire, although Palestinian
authorities said they will only back a ceasefire if the Egypt-Israel
blockade of Gaza is ended.

The first bodies recovered from Malaysian
Airline flight 17, which was downed in rebel-held eastern Ukraine, have
been flown to the Netherlands. Most of the 298 passengers who
perished in the fight were Dutch. Many have accused Ukraine’s pro-Russia
rebels of downing the plane, and the rebels have also been accused of
tampering with evidence on the ground.

It’s been 100
days since Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian school girls from the
northeastern town of Chibok. Only yesterday, 11 parents of the kidnapped girls were
killed when Boko Haram attacked their town.

One of the presentations at this week’s International AIDS
Conference was on “hard
to reach” populations. But upon deeper inspection the populations they
spoke of – prisoners in the US, drug users
in Vietnam,
and HIV patients who had stopped taking their medication – aren’t, in fact,
hard to reach.